The Greek Left and the Terror of the State

Neni Panourgia

Chapter 6. 1950–1967: Post–Civil War

Fucking Fifties

Western European governments saw the end of the Greek Civil War as a victory in the fight against world Communism, so much so that President Lyndon B. Johnson later considered Greece the Vietnam of the 1940s. The greatest irony about both the British involvement and the Truman Doctrine was that the Soviets neither actively nor implicitly supported the Communist Party's efforts to assert its size and become by force part of political power in Greece. Quite the contrary, they repeatedly advised the leadership of the KKE not to undertake a military campaign and made it quite clear that there would be no possibility of material or other support from the Soviet Union. Nikos Zachariadis, a favorite of Stalin, was repeatedly humiliated at meetings with Zhdanov, Molotov, and Dimitrov when he insisted on requesting help and was repeatedly denied it. The contemporary evidence for this is overwhelming. (See Nachmani 1990, Close 1995, Gitlin 1967, Iatrides 2005, and Farakos 2000.) In other words, there never existed an actual Communist threat in Greece, and it certainly did not come from the outside, as the Truman Doctrine claimed .

But this is exactly how Greek historiography of the 1950s, all written by the Right, treated the emphýlios, as an attempt by the KKE, supported by the Soviet Union, to take over the country. Not until 1963 did books coming from the Left suggest a different reading of the events of the preceding three decades. And only since the mid 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, have memoirs of those years and of the years spent on the islands started to appear.

The Right-wing position was reiterated in 2000 by Stathis Kalyvas (in Mazower 2000). Kalyvas redeveloped the thesis that “red terror” in Greece had been more intense than and just as calculated as “white” and “black” terror, especially during the last years of the occupation, and he accused “recent historical research” on the issue of systematically and programmatically tending to “overlook, minimize, or whitewash leftist terror.” He further chastised “even serious scholarship” for having minimized Leftist violence by employing a “skewed vocabulary,” such as that used by anthropologist Riki van Boeschoten, who characterized “the violence of EAM 'revolutionary violence' and the violence of the Right 'terrorism' ” (in Mazower 2000: 142). The only historians whom Kalyvas cites as developing an argument about Left violence during the occupation comparable to his own are Mark Mazower (1993) and David Close (1995), and even they only partially so (in Mazower 2000: 178n4).

When historians from the Left criticized this position, calling it ahistorical and deeply ideological, Kalyvas accused them of “histrionics, witch-hunts, and conspiratology,” since, he claimed, “it is widely accepted that on the level of public discourse the dominant theories about the Occupation and the emphýlios come from the blatantly partisan myths that were created in the context of the emphýlios struggle” (2003: 31). Kalyvas recognized that the narrative of the emphýlios was originally produced by the winners, while after the junta it was appropriated and changed by the “descendants of the defeated” (ibid.). He and Nikos Marantzidis, calling themselves “revisionists of history,” laid down what have come to be called (with derision) “the Ten Commandments” of the proper study of the emphýlios (2004).

Nachmani, Anikam. 1990. International Intervention in the Greek Civil War: The United Nations Special Committee on the Balkans, 1947–1952. New York: Praeger.

This is a reference to the song by Loukianos Kelaidones that I wrote about earlier (Panourgiá 1995), but now I want to look at the fifties not as they produced the middle-class generation of youth that came of age in the fifties and sixties (and thus produced the political and cultural landscape of modernity in Greece) but as they produced abject political spaces in the context of the Truman Doctrine and with the aid of the Marshall Plan. On a certain level, the doctrine and the plan secured the survival of the new middle class while giving it a certain power and authority. The term post–civil war, of course, can be taken as only a temporal marker, referring to the date when the actual fighting was over. In other words, there is nothing “post” regarding the civil war in Greece, perhaps even now.

See Gitlin 1967. In 1967, when the junta arrested all the Leftists that it could find and transported them to various camps and prisons, Tzavalás Karousos, an actor who had been persecuted since the civil war and was being arrested again at the age of sixty-two, during his transport to the camp, thinking about U.S. involvement in the junta, called Vietnam “the hope and the anguish of the whole world” (Karousos 1974: 85).

In the report that Mark Ethridge, the U.S. delegate to UNSCOB, submitted in May 1947 with his findings about outside involvement in the civil war and Communist Party actions, he mentioned that he found very little evidence to support the Greek government's claims. See US/NA 501, BC-Greece/ 4-847. This is also shown by Nachmani (1990), who has researched exhaustively all the sources of the period. The views that Ethridge presented in the report, however, are complicated by the private accounts that appear in the book that his wife, Willie Snow, wrote about her impressions of Greece, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia when she visited her husband in 1947 (Snow 1948). She unwittingly shows how Paul Porter (the head of the U.S. economic mission to Greece), her husband, members of the various foreign postwar and reconstruction delegations to Greece, members of the Greek government and the Greek aristocracy, and members of the various relief organizations informally and in social settings reinforced each other's convictions about a Communist plot and the role of international Communism in shaping the landscape of Greece immediately after the war.

In an interview that Ethridge gave in 1974 to Richard McKinzie, he mentions how, on the basis of intuition, he urged President Truman to make a declaration on account of Greece (which later became the Truman Doctrine). McKinzie mentions how, by February of 1947 (about a month before the British announced their intention of pulling out of Greece), Ethridge had sent a dispatch to the United States in which he said that it appeared to him that there was going to be an all-out Communist push to take over the government. McKinzie asked Ethridge whether he had any evidence of this or it was his own personal assessment. Ethridge seemed to flounder: “Yes, yes. Well, they were having demonstrations in Athens the whole time, and they broke up a couple of meetings of the Commission with their demonstrations outside. And I walked out of a Commission meeting, saying, 'If you people can't keep order there's no use in us going on.'… Yes, you could sense it, you could sense it. They were going to try an all-out push and the Truman Doctrine prevented it” (my emphasis). Ethridge visited the Balkans to study the postwar situation for the U.S. Department of State in 1945; he was U.S. delegate to the UN commission of investigation to study the Greek border disputes in 1947; he was U.S. representative on the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine in 1949; and he was the chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information from 1948 to 1950. His oral history interview with McKinzie took place in Moncure, North Carolina, on June 4, 1974, for the Harry S Truman Presidential Library.

To be fair, I should add that it is not only Right-wing historiography from the 1950s and 1960s that has adopted this position. Tony Judt, writing about the postwar period in Europe, without giving his sources, rehearses the same argument, while acknowledging that “despite a significant level of wartime collaboration among the bureaucratic and business elites, post-war purges were directed not at the Right but the Left. This was a unique case but a revealing one. The civil war of 1944–45 had convinced the British that only the firm re-establishment of a conservative regime in Athens would stabilize this small but strategically vital country” (2005: 48). But, looking at the transition period between the postwar and reconstruction, Judt announces that “in the post–World War Two years, the Communist ΚΚΕ terrorized villages under its control, leaving a legacy of fear and associating the radical Left in many Greek memories with repression and atrocity” (ibid.: 505). These years, of course, would be the years of the White Terror, when even U.S. observers testified to the persecution of the Left.

Kalyvas accuses the following researchers of engaging in an ideological representation of the Left and its violence (or lack thereof): (1) overlooked violence, in Tsoucalas 1969, Svoronos 1982, Collard 1989, Hondros 1983, Hart 1996; (2) minimized violence, in Smith 1984 and Fleischer 1995, who is also accused of dismissing Leftist violence as an aberration (In Mazower 2000: 142); (3) whitewashed violence, in Elephantis 2008 and Broussalis 1997.